6 ms·

The Opa Language

98 points by weavie 11y ago

bishop_mandible 11y ago
Every German speaker will read this as "The Grandpa Language".
- wofo 11y ago
  Also Dutch speakers :P
  - erkaes 11y ago
    Also Indonesian speakers :P (we got it from you Dutch)
- ushi 11y ago
  if you can do all the shiny web things by writing grandpa code, this might be a good thing :)
- phaed 11y ago
  That is really unfortunate.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  And Greeks are dancing to it.
- pmontra 11y ago
  OPA in Italian is IPO in English (actually not only Initial, any of them). Definitely a good omen for startups :-)
  - icebraining 11y ago
    On the other hand, it means Takeover (of a public company) in Portuguese. (OPA = Public Offer of Acquisition)
- KMag 11y ago
  "Opa" is very easy to learn to pronounce, and not surprisingly is used in many languages to get the attention of some of the more important people a young child may need help from. Many many languages use ma and pa/ba for parents, and I'm not surprised that opa is used for other relatives by many languages. I'm not Korean, but my understanding is one reading might be "Mister Language". Several of my Korean friends address me as "Karl Oppa" or just "Oppa". (Yes, "opa" isn't the standard Romanization, and the word order isn't correct.) In Korean "oppa" is the word for older brother used by a younger sister, and by extension, an honorific used by a younger woman to show respect for an older man. (When my Korean friends meet someone new, they quickly figure out who's older, even by just one year, in order to figure out who's supposed to use the honorific addresses.) Imagine if in English, we only used Mr. and Ms. when talking to someone who's chronologically older, and had different forms depending on if the speaker is male or female, and furthermore it was considered very rude not to use the title where appropriate. Oppa is kind of the word for "mister" used by women, but is mandatory in many more cases than would be expected in English.
  - curiousjorge 11y ago
    It always irks me, I don't know when this trend started but when I moved away from Korea in the mid 90s as a young child this was strictly a honorific for older brother from a younger sister OR maybe I was just unaware of the trend because I was a kid. So I get grossed out when a Korean girl calls me oppa and I have expressed my discomfort which was met with a cold response (I guess they really like calling older men oppa), part of the reason I never date younger Korean women. That and the whole 'mister' or aekyo (adult women emulating an infant) shit I find very creepy and unattractive. There's this national inclination for young women, sort of like Japan's obsession with schoolgirls. On the other hand, being called 'ajusshi' which doesn't carry the same affection as 'oppa' and intended for much older men and some Korean men take offense when addressed as 'ajusshi' but less so than Korean women who go apeshit when I made the mistake of calling them 'ajumma'. on an offtopic side note, Oppai in Japanese means tits.
  - evincarofautumn 11y ago
    > Imagine if in English, we only used Mr. and Ms. when talking to someone who's chronologically older, and had different forms depending on if the speaker is male or female, and furthermore it was considered very rude not to use the title where appropriate. In parts of the South, you’re still expected to use “sir” and “ma’am”, particularly with strangers. Most speakers find this a bit old-fashioned or excessively polite, though.
- pavelludiq 11y ago
  In Bulgarian it could be translated as "oops! language". Really, really unfortunate.
inglor 11y ago
Very nice work pulling this sort of thing up - but honestly? This looks terrible to actually use in code. Even if they do commit to working on this language - and it offers advantages over Meteor (which it looks to be inspired a lot from) - they have a lot of design choices I don't understand: - Inventing a new language over JS is problematic, a dependency, and you don't get goodies as they land in JS. - The fact IO is implicit and not explicit means you don't know where you're paying - and is a very leaky abstraction. - jQuery as a default part of the standard library? Really? - Anything that "automates the database" terrifies me, anything that wraps PostgreSQL and MongoDB with the same wrapper means I'm paying for impedence mismatch _somewhere_ but they're not telling me where. - Their "MVC support" section is really about scaffolding, and MVC on the server doesn't make sense anyway in this scenario. I like the JSXish'ness of some of it but honestly not sure why anyone would use it - the fact there are no strong backing companies is also worrying. That said - that's just my impression so as always I recommend you try it yourself rather than take my criticism :)
- xixixao 11y ago
  "Released in June 2011" they have been working on it for a long time, which might also explain some of the choices you pointed out.
  - inglor 11y ago
    Wow, that totally got me, thanks. 2011 definitely explains a lot of the choices like including jQuery and 'almost jsx' syntax. They have some interesting projects with it (the end to end encrypted chat) but I think they might have missed the train. This also explains not mentioning meteor.
- igravious 11y ago
  I want to counter your criticism with this: I think having XHTML as a defined type is a stroke of genius, at the risk of hyperbole. No quoting html fragments?! Damn. Wish I'd thought of that. I'd say it's because of this requirement that they couldn't use Javascript. And inventing a new language over JS is problematic. I won't even learn coffeescript and that's everywhere. You're not going to get me to learn Opa, sorry. Maybe they should have made it a very thin preprocessor where you get to inspect the JS... Object Relational Mapping and Object Document/Graph Mapping is fine so long as they're not the same mapping :) and so long as you get to inspect the SQL or MongoDB QL... Not sure what you mean by "and MVC on the server doesn't make sense anyway in this scenario" We're all familiar with MVC scaffolding from Rails by now, aren't we?
dvt 11y ago
Don't get me wrong, I feel this is an awesome project, but this looks pretty weird: #msg = <div>Thank you, user number {/counter}!</div> ... especially when everything is moving into an MVC direction. I like keeping my logic separate from my template. I may be too hasty. I'll definitely download and check it out in more detail sometime this weekend.
- klibertp 11y ago
  > but this looks pretty weird It's a classic DSL; it's more readable and easier to write than equivalent HTML/JS mix (it's both shorter and has less tokens). Such DSLs are used in some languages extensively, I think the most related is xexpr DSL, for example, http://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/servlet.html#%28def._%28%28lib._web-server%2Fservlet%2Fweb..rkt%29._send%2Fsuspend%29%29 http://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/servlet.html#%28def._... (the part in the code snipped starting with "response/xexpr"). It's in Lisp, which means they could write it without messing with language parser, but the idea is pretty much the same.
inglor 11y ago
Here is an "introduction for coders" on GH - I think it explains it better than the website https://github.com/MLstate/opalang/wiki/A-tour-of-Opa https://github.com/MLstate/opalang/wiki/A-tour-of-Opa
mhaberl 11y ago
It looks like you put some serious work into this project but I do not really like the end result.. somehow it reminds me of 90's PHP code. btw great docs, installation instructions and the landing page
thomasfoster96 11y ago
A few impressions: - Seems like the language forgot about objects (they seem to be used as collections or namespaces) - which is surprising given it's JavaScript underneath. - It also seems like the database functionality is so embedded within the language that using it would sacrifice a lot of control and would become a huge lock-in liability. - Everything is too abstracted. I must admit my first real programming experience was in PHP, and now that I've done a lot of things in Node.js and other languages I really appreciate being able to do some more things at a lower-level of abstraction (PHP ends up being a glorified templating language usually). - Edit: Oh, and please can someone find a way to nicely get rid of these JSX-esque syntax additions and just start using ES6 template strings instead. All these extra compilation steps make things so much more complicated and third-party reliant than they need be.
- klibertp 11y ago
  > make things so much more complicated Simple pre-processing and code-to-code transformation is typical in many different languages and environments. Pretty much every time you start a Java or C++ project within some IDE you're essentially generating a lot of code automatically. And in the case of various JS preprocessors/transpilers it's not even that complicated. It's mostly trivial transformations, which in more capable languages would be expressed as macros, f-exprs or something like that. Maybe try writing your transpiler sometime? It'll take a weekend, and you'll see how easy and simple it is. > Everything is too abstracted. That's only because of your background. ASP.NET or GWT guys would not agree, I imagine. > it would sacrifice a lot of control and would become a huge lock-in liability. Control over what exactly? You still have an external database you need to manage. You handle backups, schema migrations and so on. I'd say Opa's abstraction of data storage is on par with "normal" ORMs (like Django ORM) in terms of flexibility/power ratio. I don't see a lock-in potential here, as long as data store used by Opa is available to other languages and environments. You can always just load the raw data directly from DB and do anything you want with them. Would be another story if Opa used in-memory, built-in in-process data storage (which is an approach I quite like) but it doesn't.
  - thomasfoster96 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
JasonSage 11y ago
I'll be honest, I thought this project was dead. How is Opa still relevant and what, if anything, are they doing to attract new developers today?
- acheron 11y ago
  Same here -- I found this extremely interesting about 4 years ago and did some playing around with it, but the project seemed to drop off the map after awhile.
leke 11y ago
Is it still a compile to test environment?
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Cool project, and I lke to see people experimenting with new languages and tools. That said, Opa has a lot of competition. I am thinking of Clojure + Clojurescript, Meteor, Dart, etc. I don't much use Dart, but C+C and Meteor are amazing productive.
minthd 11y ago
How does Opa comapres with the scala lyft framework(which also promises a lot in the security area) ?
hbbio 11y ago
Project creator here (and kind of surprised to see Opa as news). Reading the different comments, I must say that Opa is still active (although we lack resources to animate the community). We are a small French startup meaning that I get to spend 50% of my time struggling with administration, and our evangelism resources are not compatible to those of companies like Meteor (and btw, Opa predates Meteor by a while). Currently, we use Opa to build a secure communication application, named PEPS : https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS which is a good example of a "big" and open source application written in Opa. Note also that bringing a new language (or framework) from toy examples to real apps is definitely not easy. Overall, quite glad to see that many things we introduced in Opa ("JSX" syntax, CPS-transforms, etc.) are becoming more prevalent, especially thanks to ES6. Indeed, adapting Opa to ES6, which we are looking at right now, would enable existing applications to use the latest ES6 features without changing the app code. That was one of the goal of the project: Opa was meant to be a "good way" to write applications, letting the compiler choose a target platform and write code for it. Opa is still relevant today, as a "good quality" (especially in terms of safety -- and if you are interested in certified applications like common criteria, please contact me: Opa is relevant in that space) "one-stop shop" to build develop web apps or services. Remind that when we started a few years ago, many were criticizing that we use a functional programming language, were telling us that nobody wants static typing, etc. (that was before Hack which helped a lot in popularizing the feature -- and Opa too is written in OCaml). And Opa has a future. The way the compiler is written, it's not that hard to have it compile the same application code into cloud platforms, including a lot of Amazon Lambdas...
- rufugee 11y ago
  As someone who has tried to replace gmail with Zimbra, Roundcube and others over the years, PEPS looks interesting. How production ready is it? What features would you say it's lacking?
  - hbbio 11y ago
    Thanks for your message. We maintain a roadmap: https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS/wiki/Roadmap Thanks to Opa (possibly due to that fact that we know how to use it at its best), we are able to develop features very quickly. I would say that what we need most is to optimize the UX and little details that matter to refine them over time. But overall, I think we can go technically much farther that Zimbra/Roundcube. But to achieve more popularity, we will need to beef up some marketing aspects!
skeuomorf 11y ago
People interested in secure web development frameworks should definitely check out Ur/Web http://www.impredicative.com/ur/ http://www.impredicative.com/ur/

The Opa Language

98 points by weavie 11y ago

bishop_mandible 11y ago

Every German speaker will read this as "The Grandpa Language".

wofo 11y ago
Also Dutch speakers :P
- erkaes 11y ago
  Also Indonesian speakers :P (we got it from you Dutch)
ushi 11y ago
if you can do all the shiny web things by writing grandpa code, this might be a good thing :)
phaed 11y ago
That is really unfortunate.
StavrosK 11y ago
And Greeks are dancing to it.
pmontra 11y ago
OPA in Italian is IPO in English (actually not only Initial, any of them). Definitely a good omen for startups :-)
- icebraining 11y ago
  On the other hand, it means Takeover (of a public company) in Portuguese. (OPA = Public Offer of Acquisition)
KMag 11y ago
"Opa" is very easy to learn to pronounce, and not surprisingly is used in many languages to get the attention of some of the more important people a young child may need help from. Many many languages use ma and pa/ba for parents, and I'm not surprised that opa is used for other relatives by many languages. I'm not Korean, but my understanding is one reading might be "Mister Language". Several of my Korean friends address me as "Karl Oppa" or just "Oppa". (Yes, "opa" isn't the standard Romanization, and the word order isn't correct.) In Korean "oppa" is the word for older brother used by a younger sister, and by extension, an honorific used by a younger woman to show respect for an older man. (When my Korean friends meet someone new, they quickly figure out who's older, even by just one year, in order to figure out who's supposed to use the honorific addresses.) Imagine if in English, we only used Mr. and Ms. when talking to someone who's chronologically older, and had different forms depending on if the speaker is male or female, and furthermore it was considered very rude not to use the title where appropriate. Oppa is kind of the word for "mister" used by women, but is mandatory in many more cases than would be expected in English.
- curiousjorge 11y ago
  It always irks me, I don't know when this trend started but when I moved away from Korea in the mid 90s as a young child this was strictly a honorific for older brother from a younger sister OR maybe I was just unaware of the trend because I was a kid. So I get grossed out when a Korean girl calls me oppa and I have expressed my discomfort which was met with a cold response (I guess they really like calling older men oppa), part of the reason I never date younger Korean women. That and the whole 'mister' or aekyo (adult women emulating an infant) shit I find very creepy and unattractive. There's this national inclination for young women, sort of like Japan's obsession with schoolgirls. On the other hand, being called 'ajusshi' which doesn't carry the same affection as 'oppa' and intended for much older men and some Korean men take offense when addressed as 'ajusshi' but less so than Korean women who go apeshit when I made the mistake of calling them 'ajumma'. on an offtopic side note, Oppai in Japanese means tits.
- evincarofautumn 11y ago
  > Imagine if in English, we only used Mr. and Ms. when talking to someone who's chronologically older, and had different forms depending on if the speaker is male or female, and furthermore it was considered very rude not to use the title where appropriate. In parts of the South, you’re still expected to use “sir” and “ma’am”, particularly with strangers. Most speakers find this a bit old-fashioned or excessively polite, though.
pavelludiq 11y ago
In Bulgarian it could be translated as "oops! language". Really, really unfortunate.

inglor 11y ago

Very nice work pulling this sort of thing up - but honestly? This looks terrible to actually use in code. Even if they do commit to working on this language - and it offers advantages over Meteor (which it looks to be inspired a lot from) - they have a lot of design choices I don't understand: - Inventing a new language over JS is problematic, a dependency, and you don't get goodies as they land in JS. - The fact IO is implicit and not explicit means you don't know where you're paying - and is a very leaky abstraction. - jQuery as a default part of the standard library? Really? - Anything that "automates the database" terrifies me, anything that wraps PostgreSQL and MongoDB with the same wrapper means I'm paying for impedence mismatch _somewhere_ but they're not telling me where. - Their "MVC support" section is really about scaffolding, and MVC on the server doesn't make sense anyway in this scenario. I like the JSXish'ness of some of it but honestly not sure why anyone would use it - the fact there are no strong backing companies is also worrying. That said - that's just my impression so as always I recommend you try it yourself rather than take my criticism :)

xixixao 11y ago
"Released in June 2011" they have been working on it for a long time, which might also explain some of the choices you pointed out.
- inglor 11y ago
  Wow, that totally got me, thanks. 2011 definitely explains a lot of the choices like including jQuery and 'almost jsx' syntax. They have some interesting projects with it (the end to end encrypted chat) but I think they might have missed the train. This also explains not mentioning meteor.
igravious 11y ago
I want to counter your criticism with this: I think having XHTML as a defined type is a stroke of genius, at the risk of hyperbole. No quoting html fragments?! Damn. Wish I'd thought of that. I'd say it's because of this requirement that they couldn't use Javascript. And inventing a new language over JS is problematic. I won't even learn coffeescript and that's everywhere. You're not going to get me to learn Opa, sorry. Maybe they should have made it a very thin preprocessor where you get to inspect the JS... Object Relational Mapping and Object Document/Graph Mapping is fine so long as they're not the same mapping :) and so long as you get to inspect the SQL or MongoDB QL... Not sure what you mean by "and MVC on the server doesn't make sense anyway in this scenario" We're all familiar with MVC scaffolding from Rails by now, aren't we?

dvt 11y ago

Don't get me wrong, I feel this is an awesome project, but this looks pretty weird: #msg = <div>Thank you, user number {/counter}!</div> ... especially when everything is moving into an MVC direction. I like keeping my logic separate from my template. I may be too hasty. I'll definitely download and check it out in more detail sometime this weekend.

klibertp 11y ago
> but this looks pretty weird It's a classic DSL; it's more readable and easier to write than equivalent HTML/JS mix (it's both shorter and has less tokens). Such DSLs are used in some languages extensively, I think the most related is xexpr DSL, for example, http://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/servlet.html#%28def._%28%28lib._web-server%2Fservlet%2Fweb..rkt%29._send%2Fsuspend%29%29 http://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/servlet.html#%28def._... (the part in the code snipped starting with "response/xexpr"). It's in Lisp, which means they could write it without messing with language parser, but the idea is pretty much the same.

inglor 11y ago

Here is an "introduction for coders" on GH - I think it explains it better than the website https://github.com/MLstate/opalang/wiki/A-tour-of-Opa https://github.com/MLstate/opalang/wiki/A-tour-of-Opa

mhaberl 11y ago

It looks like you put some serious work into this project but I do not really like the end result.. somehow it reminds me of 90's PHP code. btw great docs, installation instructions and the landing page

thomasfoster96 11y ago

A few impressions: - Seems like the language forgot about objects (they seem to be used as collections or namespaces) - which is surprising given it's JavaScript underneath. - It also seems like the database functionality is so embedded within the language that using it would sacrifice a lot of control and would become a huge lock-in liability. - Everything is too abstracted. I must admit my first real programming experience was in PHP, and now that I've done a lot of things in Node.js and other languages I really appreciate being able to do some more things at a lower-level of abstraction (PHP ends up being a glorified templating language usually). - Edit: Oh, and please can someone find a way to nicely get rid of these JSX-esque syntax additions and just start using ES6 template strings instead. All these extra compilation steps make things so much more complicated and third-party reliant than they need be.

klibertp 11y ago
> make things so much more complicated Simple pre-processing and code-to-code transformation is typical in many different languages and environments. Pretty much every time you start a Java or C++ project within some IDE you're essentially generating a lot of code automatically. And in the case of various JS preprocessors/transpilers it's not even that complicated. It's mostly trivial transformations, which in more capable languages would be expressed as macros, f-exprs or something like that. Maybe try writing your transpiler sometime? It'll take a weekend, and you'll see how easy and simple it is. > Everything is too abstracted. That's only because of your background. ASP.NET or GWT guys would not agree, I imagine. > it would sacrifice a lot of control and would become a huge lock-in liability. Control over what exactly? You still have an external database you need to manage. You handle backups, schema migrations and so on. I'd say Opa's abstraction of data storage is on par with "normal" ORMs (like Django ORM) in terms of flexibility/power ratio. I don't see a lock-in potential here, as long as data store used by Opa is available to other languages and environments. You can always just load the raw data directly from DB and do anything you want with them. Would be another story if Opa used in-memory, built-in in-process data storage (which is an approach I quite like) but it doesn't.
- thomasfoster96 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

JasonSage 11y ago

I'll be honest, I thought this project was dead. How is Opa still relevant and what, if anything, are they doing to attract new developers today?

acheron 11y ago
Same here -- I found this extremely interesting about 4 years ago and did some playing around with it, but the project seemed to drop off the map after awhile.

leke 11y ago

Is it still a compile to test environment?

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Cool project, and I lke to see people experimenting with new languages and tools. That said, Opa has a lot of competition. I am thinking of Clojure + Clojurescript, Meteor, Dart, etc. I don't much use Dart, but C+C and Meteor are amazing productive.

minthd 11y ago

How does Opa comapres with the scala lyft framework(which also promises a lot in the security area) ?

hbbio 11y ago

Project creator here (and kind of surprised to see Opa as news). Reading the different comments, I must say that Opa is still active (although we lack resources to animate the community). We are a small French startup meaning that I get to spend 50% of my time struggling with administration, and our evangelism resources are not compatible to those of companies like Meteor (and btw, Opa predates Meteor by a while). Currently, we use Opa to build a secure communication application, named PEPS : https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS which is a good example of a "big" and open source application written in Opa. Note also that bringing a new language (or framework) from toy examples to real apps is definitely not easy. Overall, quite glad to see that many things we introduced in Opa ("JSX" syntax, CPS-transforms, etc.) are becoming more prevalent, especially thanks to ES6. Indeed, adapting Opa to ES6, which we are looking at right now, would enable existing applications to use the latest ES6 features without changing the app code. That was one of the goal of the project: Opa was meant to be a "good way" to write applications, letting the compiler choose a target platform and write code for it. Opa is still relevant today, as a "good quality" (especially in terms of safety -- and if you are interested in certified applications like common criteria, please contact me: Opa is relevant in that space) "one-stop shop" to build develop web apps or services. Remind that when we started a few years ago, many were criticizing that we use a functional programming language, were telling us that nobody wants static typing, etc. (that was before Hack which helped a lot in popularizing the feature -- and Opa too is written in OCaml). And Opa has a future. The way the compiler is written, it's not that hard to have it compile the same application code into cloud platforms, including a lot of Amazon Lambdas...

rufugee 11y ago
As someone who has tried to replace gmail with Zimbra, Roundcube and others over the years, PEPS looks interesting. How production ready is it? What features would you say it's lacking?
- hbbio 11y ago
  Thanks for your message. We maintain a roadmap: https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS/wiki/Roadmap Thanks to Opa (possibly due to that fact that we know how to use it at its best), we are able to develop features very quickly. I would say that what we need most is to optimize the UX and little details that matter to refine them over time. But overall, I think we can go technically much farther that Zimbra/Roundcube. But to achieve more popularity, we will need to beef up some marketing aspects!

skeuomorf 11y ago

People interested in secure web development frameworks should definitely check out Ur/Web http://www.impredicative.com/ur/ http://www.impredicative.com/ur/